Ninety miles from the South Eastern tip of the United States, Liberty has no stead. In order for Liberty to exist and thrive, Tyranny must be identified, recognized, confronted and extinguished.
Metal foams are light and surprisingly tough. Actually, make that very tough: In this video, a composite metal foam turns an armor-piercing bullet to dust on impact, as if it were a piece of chalk.
The experiment was performed by researchers from NC State, led by Afsaneh Rabiei. It saw a M2 armor-piercing projectile—0.3 inches in diameter—being fired at a lump of metal foam. Rabiei explained to PhysOrg what happened:
“We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters. To put that in context, the National Institute of Justice standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.” Which, wow.
These metal foams can be made in many different ways. Some are manufactured by bubbling gas through molten metal, while others cast metallic alloy around hollow metal spheres to provide voids. Either way, metal foams—which have existed in one form or other for decades now–seem to finally be coming of age.
Radical Islamists have found a new refuge in Bosnia. They recruit fighters, promote jihad and preach a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam -- just across the border from the European Union.
Almost nothing remains of Ibro. There is just a single childhood photo remaining, an image of a flaxen-haired five-year-old that Ibro's father scanned so he could always carry it with him on his mobile phone. But no recent pictures are available. Before Ibro left Bosnia to join Islamic State (IS) in 2014, he tore up all the images of himself he could find. His interpretation of Sharia included the belief that images of people were haram -- forbidden. Ibro's father Sefik, a 58-year-old casual laborer, regularly visits friends to recharge his phone. Sefik lives in a hovel he built himself on the edge of the village of Donja Slapnica. His home has a wood stove and an outhouse but no electricity. When it gets cold, he wears his jacket and a stocking cap indoors.
The emotions Sefik has been carrying around with him since the day when Ibro disappeared are not immediately apparent from the outside. "When you're dead, I won't pray for you because you are an infidel." That's the last thing that Sefik, a slender man with a moustache, heard from Ibro. From his own son. Ibro Cufurovic, born in 1995, is one of 200 to 300 Islamist radicals who have left Bosnia-Herzegovina to join IS or al-Qaida in Syria or Iraq. Two of the most wanted terrorists in the world are among them: Bajro Ikanovic, for many years the commander of the largest IS training camp in northern Syria; and Nusret Imamovic, a leading member of the Nusra Front in Syria, a group tied to al-Qaida. Bosnia, says the American Balkan expert and former NSA employee John Schindler, "is considered something of a 'safehouse' for radicals," and now harbors a stable terrorist infrastructure. It is one that is not strictly hierarchical and is thus considered "off-message" within IS, but it nonetheless represents an existential threat to...
When I first saw this trailer, I said to myself, that looks just like the wildly popular video I posted a couple of years back. I watched the video again and was amazed at how compelling it still was, how it drew me in, it is a wild roller coaster ride and it is simply awesome. This is the video, judge for yourself: The Coolest Thing You Have Seen This Year So Far...
